I got to work today, started doing some stuff, and looked at Outlook to discover that this was the day I was supposed to report to jury duty. I had completely forgotten about it. Luckily, where I work isn’t too far from the Worcester courthouse, so I was able to get there and not be too late.

Fairly early in the day, a large group of us was summoned to be impaneled for a case. I was briefly considered for the jury. However, the defendant was Price Chopper Operations of Massachusetts, and my mother-in-law works for Price Chopper, and my wife worked for them in the past, possibly during the time that the incident in the trial took place.

• Last weekend’s prerelease was rather disappointing with the new prereleases-everywhere format. Attendance was extremely below our expectations, and a lot of the players seemed rather unhappy with the changes as well. Hopefully, Wizards will wise up and figure out a better approach.
• I bought a Super Nintendo at a yard sale over the summer, and I finally bothered to hook it up and it works great. I thought that we still had a bunch of games for it at my parents’ house, but apparently they got rid of them at a Historical Society Yard Sale at some point. So, I’m slowly working on buying controllers and games on eBay. But if anybody has any old SNES stuff they’d like to get rid of, let me know.
• Speaking of getting rid of stuff, we may be selling off portions of our Magic card collection that are worth anything soon. To a large extent, the cards are just sitting around our bedroom taking up space. If anyone’s looking for anything in particular (like Judge foils?) before we sell it to a store, let me know.
• Hannah ate her first “solid” food yesterday evening. (That is, baby-rice-cereal-mixed-with-breast-milk.) She did a wonderful job with it.
• I’ll be head judging a PTQ at TJ Collectibles on October 18.

Google Maps recently added our road. It uses it in its directions. I guess we’ve finally made it onto the real map.

The road really requires a vehicle designed for off-roading, so I highly recommend avoiding it when driving.

I think I may need to put up a sign saying to ignore computerized directions sending you down that way. We already get the occasional person following GPS directions. If we continue to get in more mapping databases, we’ll get more and more people.

The U.S. Mint is offering a wonderful program, where they offer sets of 250 $1 coins for $250, charged to a credit card, with free shipping. I just bought the maximum-currently-available of $2500 worth (2 sets of $250 for each of 5 presidents) with my cash-back credit card. I intend to deposit it all (maybe all except $25-$50 in coins to spend) in my bank as soon as it comes in. Between (1) the cash back on the item, (2) having the money in my checking account for roughly a month earning 4% interest, and (3) hitting the threshold for the much higher cash back tier a few months earlier, I expect to make north of $100 on the deal, for very little work.

This weekend for the Shards of Alara Prerelease, I’ll be the head judge at:

• Saturday: The Game Castle in Londonderry, NH.
• Sunday: Rising Phoenix Games in Cherry Valley, MA. (With a special appearance by Rob Alexander in the morning.)

This prerelease is working rather different from previous ones, in that there are a lot more locations. TJ Collectibles has 8 event locations this weekend. So, things should be interesting. I’m looking forward to a fun weekend.

“I wonder if, had contemporary news editors existed back in the days when books were invented, they would have published big scary articles expounding on the dangers of reading a book while riding a horse or chopping firewood.”

Today is the day of the Massachusetts State Primary, the third of this year’s 4 elections. (There are 4 in Massachusetts towns, at least. I think Cities use a different schedule for their municipal elections.) The purpose of primaries is to whittle down choices such that we as a society don’t end up with two people with similar views going against one person with opposing views, leading to the possibility that the the one person would win when people were in fact okay with either of the two people with similar views.

“I am the very model of a modern text encoding scheme”…

• Last weekend, I head judged a Magic PTQ with 161 players, which is rather large for this type of event, and the second-largest event I’ve ever head judged. There was a lot to do (including dealing with a table collapse), but our staff dealt with it rather well.
• A few weeks ago, we signed up with Netflix, primarily to continue watching Star Trek past the Next Generation series. I’m quite impressed with the service so far.
• We’re continuing to go monthly to Scrabble night at the Charlton Library. We may look at going to a more competitive event at some point (primarily for Jessi’s benefit).
• For the Shards of Alara prerelease, I’ll be head judging at some store in New Hampshire (I don’t know the name or specific location offhand) on Saturday the 27th, and at Rising Phoenix Games on Sunday the 28th, as part of the TJ Collectibles network of prereleases.
• I have Jury Duty in 4 weeks.
• Hannah is growing quickly. She can stand with support, and smiles when she sees me, and I’m sure that before long she’ll have the run of the house. She started sleeping in her own room last week.

Due to a last-minute cancellation by the person who was going to be there, I’ve just been contracted as the Head Judge of the PTQ this Saturday run by TJ Collectibles in Hartford.